CAPEC-31 — Accessing/Intercepting/Modifying HTTP Cookies
CAPEC-31: Accessing/Intercepting/Modifying HTTP Cookies
MITRE CAPEC attack pattern
| Status | Draft |
| Typical severity | High |
| Likelihood of attack | High |
| Catalogue | CAPEC 3.9 (2023-01-24) |
Description
This attack relies on the use of HTTP Cookies to store credentials, state information and other critical data on client systems. There are several different forms of this attack. The first form of this attack involves accessing HTTP Cookies to mine for potentially sensitive data contained therein. The second form involves intercepting this data as it is transmitted from client to server. This intercepted information is then used by the adversary to impersonate the remote user/session. The third form is when the cookie's content is modified by the adversary before it is sent back to the server. Here the adversary seeks to convince the target server to operate on this falsified information.
Where this sits in the chain
A finding maps to a weakness (CWE), a weakness is exploited by an attack pattern (CAPEC), and an attack pattern shows up in ATT&CK as observed adversary behaviour. This page is the middle hop.
Weaknesses exploited: CWE-20, CWE-113, CWE-302, CWE-311, CWE-315, CWE-384, CWE-472, CWE-539, CWE-565, CWE-602, CWE-642
ATT&CK techniques: T1539
Prerequisites
- Target server software must be a HTTP daemon that relies on cookies.
- The cookies must contain sensitive information.
- The adversary must be able to make HTTP requests to the server, and the cookie must be contained in the reply.
Skills required
- Low: To overwrite session cookie data, and submit targeted attacks via HTTP
- High: Exploiting a remote buffer overflow generated by attack
Consequences
- Confidentiality: Read Data
- Integrity: Modify Data
- Confidentiality, Access Control, Authorization: Gain Privileges
Mitigations
- Design: Use input validation for cookies
- Design: Generate and validate MAC for cookies
- Implementation: Use SSL/TLS to protect cookie in transit
- Implementation: Ensure the web server implements all relevant security patches, many exploitable buffer overflows are fixed in patches issued for the software.